Boswell woman sentenced for stealing pills

May 02, 2008|By JUDY D.J. ELLICH, Daily American Staff Writer

After two years, five defense attorneys, a guilty plea on the first day of trial and a last-minute attempt to withdraw that plea, a Boswell woman was sentenced for stealing prescription drugs from a former patient.

Roberta Yurkovich-Locher, 38, was sentenced to serve 15 days to 12 months in the Somerset County Jail for stealing OxyContin, a potent prescription painkiller, from an elderly patient’s family on Sept. 3, 2005, while working as a registered nurse at The Patriot, Somerset. Yurkovich-Locher was sentenced on a charge of procuring drugs by fraud.

Just 15 minutes before her scheduled sentencing, Yurkovich-Locher asked to withdraw her guilty plea and asserted her right to trial.

“Vacillating, vacillating, vacillating,” said Westmoreland County Senior Judge Charles H. Loughran, who presided over the sentencing, according to a court transcript.

“Five times this county gets ready, the district attorney gets ready, the witnesses get ready, the poor victim . . .” he said. “Enough is enough.”

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He then denied her request to withdraw the guilty plea, calling the request “untimely.”

Yurkovich-Locher said she was seeing a psychologist and was off her medications when she submitted her plea on Jan. 14. But the judge denied her claims.

“My clear understanding in watching her . . . was that it was voluntarily, intelligently made and freely made,” he said.

At the hearing, Yurkovich-Locher said she did not want to make an actual admission of wrongdoing. She said she was pleading guilty because of the possibility that a jury might convict her if the case proceeded to trial.

According to police, Yurkovich-Locher and Tina L. Cobaugh, also a registered nurse at The Patriot in 2005, contacted a resident’s daughter, Karen Kuhn of Somerset, and advised her there was no OxyContin for her mother at the facility. Kuhn brought 10 OxyContin pills to the nursing home, but the medication was never reported as having been delivered.

“What you’ve done is despicable — to be involved in taking drugs from a lady who needs her drugs . . . for pain,” Loughran said.

The 80-year-old woman, Patricia Feldman, wrote a letter to the court March 31 about the incident and how it affected her.

“I was a nervous wreck for sometime,” she wrote. “When you’re old (81 almost) you become frightened when things are not as they should be. It makes you insecure about the medical people you see, and keeps the incident in your mind.”

Feldman wrote that when the incident first happened, she wondered what she was given to replace the painkillers she should have had.

As part of her sentence, Yurkovich-Locher is not to volunteer or be employed as a nurse or nurse’s aide, or work where elderly people reside. She was a registered nurse for 15 years before the incident.

Additionally, she must pay court costs, a supervisory fee, $180 in restitution to Feldman and a $500 fine. She must undergo a mental health evaluation and successfully complete any recommended counseling and treatment. She is to have no contact with the victim or the victim’s family. She was also ordered to submit to random drug testing while she is on parole. She was released from prison earlier this week after serving her minimum sentence.

“If you’re taking drugs for recreation or not, I don’t know. One thing for sure is I’m going to find out in the random testing for the next year. It’s going to show up,” Loughran said.

If a test shows positive for OxyContin or Percocet, “You’re going to see me again and you’ll wish you wouldn’t,” the judge added.

Yurkovich-Locher initially was charged with conspiracy, theft by deception, receiving stolen property and acquiring a controlled substance by fraud or misrepresentation.

Cobaugh, 43, Boswell, was sentenced March 6, 2007, to 30 days to 12 months in jail after pleading guilty to the same charge. She was credited for 17 days served.

Yurkovich-Locher and Cobaugh implicated each other in the crime, but not themselves.

The Patriot has implemented additional security measures to ensure that a similar incident doesn’t happen again, said Maria Fisher, administrator at The Patriot. Fisher was not administrator when it happened but is aware of the incident and its aftermath.

One added security measure has to do with the daily counting of medicine at the facility. By law, narcotics have to be kept under double lock and key and checked by two different nurses daily, Fisher said. Now, there are three people checking to make sure the medication count is correct.

“If the count is off, no staff member is allowed to leave the building until the count is proper or the error is found,” Fisher said.